Apparatus and method for providing a secondary messaging system for a ToL communication system

Abstract

An external or secondary messaging system is coupled to a ToL system for providing a temporary storage cache where messages may be left when elements of ToL system cannot be reached do to outage events. The secondary messaging system is located outside the area of the ToL system that may be subject to the outage event and hides the outage event from the caller (i.e., the caller leaves a message on a messaging system he or she believes the normal messaging system of the party called).

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates generally to distributed communication systems, in particular, telephony-over-local area network (LAN) (ToL) communication systems, and the like, and more specifically, to an apparatus and method for providing an alternative or secondary voice messaging system for a distributed communication network.[0002]Distributed communication systems such as telephony-over-LAN (ToL) communication systems and the like are highly complex networked systems containing a plurality of elements or devices for routing calls to users of the system. For example, an exemplary ToL system might include a network having two or more sub-networks, each sub-network including a plurality of clients providing communication services to multiple users. Such a ToL system may further include one or more gatekeepers for assisting in the routing of calls to destinations within the system, a gateway for interconnecting the ToL system with an external switche...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0006]According to a specific embodiment, the present invention provides a communication system capable of furnishing emergency call diversion to a messaging system. The communication system is comprised of a ToL system including an initial entry device for receiving a call from an external network for a client of the ToL system. A messaging system is interconnected with the ToL system so that the messaging system remains operational during an outage of the ToL system. The initial entry device is capable of causing the call to be diverted to the messaging system for providing a response to the call during the outage of the ToL system.

Problems solved by technology

Distributed communication systems such as telephony-over-LAN (ToL) communication systems and the like are highly complex networked systems containing a plurality of elements or devices for routing calls to users of the system.

However, because of the complexity of typical ToL systems, forwarding of calls to messaging systems within a ToL system may involve many steps.

As a result, during an outage of the ToL system caused by power failure, network or equipment failure, or the like, it is likely that an external caller may be unable to leave a message on the messaging system employed by the ToL system, because the gateway cannot reach through the broken network to reach the messaging system and would instead experience fast busy or ring-no-answer tones.

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